Canadian Cincinnatus

The Alberta and UK elections: how to deal with insurgencies and how not to

On May 5, Albertans voted to end the longest unbroken streak of success that a governing party has ever enjoyed in Canada. The Alberta Progressive Conservative Party had been in power for 44 years straight. Today, the NDP, a socialist party, runs Alberta. The formerly governing Progressive Conservatives, led by Jim Prentice, went from 70 seats down to 10. They aren’t even the official opposition. In contrast, the British Conservative Party, led by David Cameron, was widely expected to lose seats, possibly even losing power to the Labour Party. Defying the pundits and the pollsters, David Cameron went on to win an outright majority on May 6. I believe the difference in outcome was due to the different way they handled their respective right-wing challengers.

The Alberta PC’s were challenged on the right by the Wildrose Alliance; the British Conservatives faced off against the United Kingdom Independence Party.

The Wildrose Alliance has been around in one form or another since 2005. In the 2004 and 2008 provincial elections, it won one and zero seats respectively. However, in 2012 it jumped to 17 seats. Trouble was brewing for the PC’s and everybody knew it. After an internal struggle to remove a horrible leader - Alison Redford, the ruling Conservatives decided to do something about Wildrose. On Dec 17, 2014 Wildrose leader, Danielle Smith and eight other MLA’s crossed the floor to sit with the Progressive Conservative government. Problem solved, or so it seemed. Unfortunately for the PC’s, Wildrose climbed from 17 seats in the 2012 election to 21 seats in the 2015 election – more than making up for the defections.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, David Cameron was grappling with his own right-wing threat: UKIP. An Alberta-style decapitation strike wasn’t in the cards: UKIP hardly had any seats in Parliament (except for some Conservative turncoats). Instead, Cameron stole some of UKIP’s thunder by promising to hold a referendum on EU membership and negotiate a better deal for the UK in Europe. He also made encouraging noises on immigration. Whether he will carry through on any of this now that he has his majority remains to be seen, but it was enough to keep UKIP from toppling Conservative MP’s through vote splitting.

Until this year, the classic example of this strategy was the Australian federal election of 2004 when John Howard won his fourth term as Prime Minister. While the vote share of his Labour rivals remained steady at 38%, his vote share increased by 3.6%. How did he do this? Simple. He co-opted the program of his smaller, right-wing competitors. For instance, the One Nation Party, led by Pauline Hanson – the ‘fish and chips lady’ - saw its vote share drop by over 3%. With new, revised policies on immigration, many One Nation sympathizers voted for John Howard instead, because he was actually in a position to deliver.

The classic example of what not to do occurred in the 1993 Canadian federal elections when Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservatives went down in flames. After winning the 1988 federal election over the US free trade deal, Mulroney chose to systematically humiliate his right-wing base. Once free trade was passed, he veered left. He instituted a value added tax, passed draconian gun-control laws, and presided over chronic sky-high deficits. If this wasn’t enough, he tried - twice - to fundamentally rework the Canadian constitution in order to enshrine left-wing labour laws, multiculturalism, socialized medicine, and an apartheid system for native Canadians into its text. Thankfully he failed. When Canada’s right inevitably revolted, he thought, where are they going to go? Where they went to was the Reform Party, which went from one seat in 1988 to 51 seats in 1993. Thanks to vote splitting, the formerly dominant Tories went from 156 seats to two in 1993. Yes, you read that right, two.

The lesson for political parties in first-past-the-post electoral systems seems to be this: if you have a challenger who competes against you for your core voters, you had better take them seriously, even if they have achieved little to date. They will continue to be unsuccessful until, all of a sudden, they are no longer. The best way to alleviate the threat is to co-opt at least part of their policies. Because the people who join protest parties are animated by principles rather than ministerial limousines, a decapitation strike - like the one Alberta Premier Jim Prentice expertly executed against Wildrose - won’t work. The absolute worst thing to do is what Brian Mulroney and his hapless successor Kim Campbell did: spit in their faces.

There is a cautionary note for the victorious David Cameron in all of this. Just because UKIP won only one seat (out of 650) in the British Parliament, it nevertheless should not be ignored. UKIP received the third highest number of votes in Britain; its problem is that its supporters are spread out evenly across the UK. The Scottish National Party only got 4.7% of the vote but, because their supporters are concentrated in Scotland, they won 56 seats. In a first-past-the-post electoral system, a party can win many votes and have nothing to show for it, until they cross some critical (but ill-marked) threshold. The thing Cameron must remember is that the Wildrose Alliance won almost no seats in its first two outings, but look where they are now – 11 seats ahead of the once-dominant Alberta Tories. Cameron had better not be as complacent with UKIP as the Alberta Tories were with Wildrose. One day, the insurgents might just cross that threshold. In 2004 and 2008, Wildrose received 9% and 6.5% of the vote respectively. In 2015, UKIP won 12.6%, so watch out David.

UKIP and the Tea Party: partying like it’s the 1990’s (1990’s Canada, that is)

According to the Daily Mail, the upstart conservative, anti-EU, anti-immigration party in Great Britain has just caused another political upset when a popular Conservative MP walked across the aisle to join UKIP. According to polls, the resulting by-election promises to be ‘a bloodbath’ for David Cameron’s ruling Tories.

As a Canadian observer of the domestic political scene in both the UK and the US, the rise of UKIP in Britain, and the rise of the tea party in the US reminds me of nothing more than Canada in the early 1990’s, with the Reform Party, led by Preston Manning, arriving on the scene. As in the US and UK today, the federal political scene was fossilized by three political parties (the then-ruling Progressive Conservatives, the Liberals, and the NDP). With the increasing leftward direction of Brian Mulroney’s PCs, differences between the three mainstream parties became increasingly harder to detect. The ruling class in Ottawa increasingly behaved like, well, like a homogenous ruling class. The us-vs-them dynamic created by the arrogance of Canada’s rulers set off a wave of populism, one that the Reform Party rode to victory (well, eventually).

In England, the pro-EU, pro-immigration, status quo is being challenged by UKIP. In the US, the no-constitutional-limits, spendaholic, amnesty-for-everybody status quo is being challenged by the spontaneous grass-roots movement known as the Tea Party.

It is important to note that UKIP founder Nigel Farage is a keen student of Canadian political history and has explicitly modeled UKIP after the Reform Party. At least this is what he said when he was the keynote speaker at the Manning Networking Conference in Ottawa two years ago.

I am sure my American readers are wondering, so what happened? The decisive event was the 1993 Federal Election, the most important election in recent Canadian political history. It had several immediate effects. Foremost, the ruling Progressive Conservatives (PC’s) were almost completely wiped out. After rats like Prime Minister Brian Mulroney deserted the sinking ship, the party ended up in the hands of incompetent hoplophobe, Kim Campbell. Her party went from 156 seats in Parliament (out of 295) to two. That’s right – just two PC Members of Parliament, neither one of which was her. Second, vote-splitting between the Reform and the PC’s led to ten years of Liberal rule. Third, the rise of the Reform Party from the backwoods of Alberta completely upended the prevailing political orthodoxy. As a result, the victorious Liberals were forced to govern like fiscal conservatives. And when Reform and the PCs amalgamated to form the new Conservative Party in 2004 (jettisoning the ‘Progressive’ label), Reformers (like Stephen Harper) were in the driver’s seat, and the Red Tories ended up in the back of the bus. Americans who are wondering why there has been so much common sense coming out of Canada recently, when it has historically been more socialist than the US, this is the backstory.

UKIP Victory in UK council elections echoes rise of Reform Party in Canada

For a few years now, UKIP - that is the United Kingdom Independence Party – has been a growing fringe player on the UK political scene. They have capitalized on the increasing anti-EU sentiment in Britain, but until last week, they weren’t in the big leagues with the Tories or Labour or the Liberal-Democrats. As a result of the council elections where they won 153 seats, that has now change.

I heard UKIP leader Nigel Farage speak at the Manning Networking Conference of 2013 and was impressed. I learned there that Farage was a keen student of Canada’s Reform Party and its founder, Preston Manning.

Like the Reform Party before it, UKIP appeals to blue-collar workers who are normally repulsed by big-business Red Tories. And like the Reform Party, it is a reaction to a dysfunctional political consensus that had built up - in Canada, by Pierre Trudeau, and in Britain, by Tony Blair (e.g. ‘cool Britannia’).

Appropriately enough, there are now calls for a UKIP-Tory alliance. Predictably enough, the Red Tory mush-head currently leading the British Conservative Party, David Cameron, is resisting this call, playing the role of Jean Charest and Joe Clarke to a T.

(Believe it or not, disgruntled PC’s, refusing to come to grips with political reality, are still around in Canada, this time sporting the ‘Progressive Canadian moniker. They are led by that most unsympathetic of Brian Mulroney’s cabinet ministers, Sinclair Stevens, a man who was forced to resign from office in disgrace.)

To a Canadian observer who became politically active in the 1990’s, it is déjà vu all over again.

Hopefully, it ends as well in Britain as it did in one of her former colonies.

 

Gun crime soars in the land of no handguns

According to the Daily Mail:

“The Government's latest crime figures were condemned as "truly terrible" by the Tories today as it emerged that gun crime in England and Wales soared by 35% last year.

Criminals used handguns in 46% more offences, Home Office statistics revealed.

Firearms were used in 9,974 recorded crimes in the 12 months to last April, up from 7,362. It was the fourth consecutive year to see a rise and there were more than 2,200 more gun crimes last year than the previous peak in 1993.”

Perhaps the UK should ban handguns. Just look at Jamaica! Oh well. But if Jamaica were an island nation with no land borders, maybe a gun ban would have worked there.

“Figures showed the number of crimes involving handguns had more than doubled since the post-Dunblane massacre ban on the weapons, from 2,636 in 1997-1998 to 5,871.”

Oh oh.

“Unadjusted figures showed overall recorded crime in the 12 months to last September rose 9.3%, but the Home Office stressed that new procedures had skewed the figures.”

The government response?

“With new recording procedures taken into account the actual overall rise was just 2%, the Home Office said.”

In other words, statistical trickery. 

“Shadow home secretary Oliver Letwin said: "These figures are truly terrible.

"Despite the street crime initiative, robbery is massively up. So are gun-related crimes, domestic burglary, retail burglary, and drug offences. 

"The only word for this is failure: the Government's response of knee-jerk reactions, gimmicks and initiatives is not working and confused signals on sentences for burglary will not help either.” 

Perhaps if the Conservatives ran Britain, there would be a more substantive response to the crime problem.

Oh…

New Civility Watch: leftists violently ‘celebrate” the death of Margaret Thatcher

According to the National Post:

“the BBC reported that seven police officers were injured in Bristol in southwest England as they tried to break up a street party apparently celebrating Thatcher’s death.

The injuries to officers came after about 200 revellers in Bristol refused police requests to disperse, police said. “Bottles and cans were thrown at officers,” Chief Inspector Mark Jackson of Avon and Somerset Constabulary told AFP. 

“A police vehicle was damaged and one person was arrested for violent disorder. Some small bin fires were also started and the fire service attended.” Police said the party was understood to be a celebration of Thatcher’s death but that investigations were continuing."

We need to keep a mental tally of incidents like this because, in spite of the alarming frequency with which they occur, they don’t prevent the left from lecturing us about ‘extremism’. The most infamous example was President Obama’s speech after the Gabby Gifford shooting, where he falsely insinuated that ‘extremist’ right-wing rhetoric helped push the deranged gunman over the edge. And if there isn’t an incident to leverage, they simply make one up, like the demonstrably false accusation by members of the Congressional Black Caucus that the n-word was used against them at a Tea Party Rally on Capitol Hill.

This hutzpah is amazing considering the fact that almost all incidents of political bad manners and violence are from the left, whether a violent celebration of a Conservative Prime Minister’s death, or chanting “Bush is Hitler” for 8 years, or a G20 riot; the list goes on and on. There is no reason to meekly accept lectures on the horribleness of Harper’s attack ads from a party that gave us the “guns in the streets” ad. The fact is, there is simply no conservative equivalent of the Margaret Thatcher death party anywhere. They say talk radio is ‘extreme’? Try a typical left-wing street demonstration, where every form of paranoid conspiracy theory and genocidal lunacy is openly peddled, celebrated and advocated for. You never hear about it because the media maintains radio silence about such goings-on, and no prominent left-of-center politician laments the state of politics because of it.

Unfortunately, all too often, clueless conservatives are buffaloed into believing these exhortations about civility are sincere, even moral, statements. They are not. They are bilge - and sanctimonious bilge at that. We must call them on their hypocrisy – and stop taking the insult on top of the injury.

An unarmed society is an impolite society: According to an Iraqi immigrant, Cool Britannia is “more dangerous here than Iraq”

According to the Daily Mail:

“A shopkeeper who fought off two armed robbers said the streets around his inner city Birmingham store were ‘more violent’ than his native Iraq.

Kochar Rasul, 30, made a new life for himself and his family in Britain after fleeing from Kurdistan to escape Saddam Hussein’s evil regime.

But he was forced to defend himself using a shop sign when two gunmen pounced as he locked up his shop in Handsworth, Birmingham, just before midnight on Monday.”

“Mr Rasul came to Britain in 2003 when the Kurds were being persecuted in their native Iraq.

‘I thought it would be safe here, but it isn’t, it’s very dangerous with crime always going on and lots of bad people around,’ he said.

‘It’s more dangerous here than Iraq because at least there, you knew who your enemies are.’

Detective Constable Phil Langstone, from Force CID in Harborne, praised Mr Rasul’s courage.

‘The victim was very brave in his attempt to fight off the attackers and the fact that armed officers just happened to be passing at that particular moment was a case of being in the right place at the right time,’ he said.’”

It must be noted that handguns and all semi-auto rifles have been banned in the UK since the mid-nineties, and homeowners who defend themselves against violent intruders are often mercilessly prosecuted by the Leviathan.

Sharia Law enforcement in London, England

This news clip from London is about a bunch of Muslim clerics who are now starting to enforce Sharia law on the streets in neighbourhoods with large Muslim populations, complete with signs declaring “Sharia controlled zone” and street-level enforcers of Sharia law.

At 1:11 of the clip, you can see a one of these enforcers comes with red hair and fuzzy red beard. In other words, he is not a Muslim by birth but is a native Briton. If there is one category of people I despise it is traitors. Islamofascists are at war with the West and England, and this twit takes their side against civilization – his civilization. He belongs to the same tribe as Winston Churchill, Sir Isaac Newton and William Shakespeare and he renounces his heritage for third-world barbarism. Fie.

Of course, when guilt-addled anti-west multiculturalism is taught in western schools, the danger is that some of the schoolkids will actually believe the claptrap.

On a more positive note, the last third of the clip depicts Londoners fighting back against the barbarians in their midst, from the police to ordinary citizens. I think as time goes on, the average people of the UK will be taking an increasingly tough line on this kind of nonsense.

 

 

Call for right to bear arms in UK after riots

This comment from the Telegraph’s Nile Gardiner:

“During the Los Angeles riots in 1992, many store owners in the south central part of the city defended their property against marauding gangs with their own weapons... And across the country, Americans admired their bravery, thankful for the Second Amendment to the US Constitution which protects their right to keep and bear arms, and thereby defend themselves, their families and their property. In contrast in London in 2011, shopkeepers were left at the mercy of feral, brutal thugs acting with impunity across whole swathes of the capital as the police were overwhelmed. If they had the right to bear arms and defend their stores with force, it would have been a very different story, and brutal looters would have met firm resistance.

Britain’s gun laws are among the most draconian in the world, yet the nation has some of the highest levels of violent crime and burglary in the West, and there is no shortage of gun crime in major cities such as London and Manchester. While criminal gangs are often able to acquire firearms on the black market, ordinary law-abiding British citizens are barred from owning guns for self-defence.” 

Remember, the right to keep and bear arms has little to do with punching holes in paper targets or shooting ducks. It is about the most basic human right of all: the right to defend yourself, your family and your property.

At stake is whether you are a free man or a pawn.

 

The anarchist violence in the UK

Nick Cohen of the Spectator gets it:

As for the anarchists, let us be honest and acknowledge political violence is not always futile. If there isn’t violence, the media will give only perfunctory coverage to a demonstration, something that ought to worry my colleagues more than it does. Today’s proponents of breaking the law and scaring shop girls can also say that riots and a mass refusal to pay destroyed the poll tax in Mrs. Thatcher's day. I am sure readers can throw the moral argument against political violence in a democracy in their faces, but for me the decisive point is that by the time of the protests against the poll tax exploded, virtually everyone in Britain except Mrs. Thatcher had accepted the case against it.

I have long noted that many political strategists suffer from the desire to prefer politically correct shibboleths over cold, unpleasant truths. For instance, many believe that political violence doesn’t work. While it true that middle class voters are repelled by the sight of professional left-wing vandals ritualistically fighting in the street, history nevertheless teaches us that political violence is also an effective way of getting what you want. Many people can be scared into ‘going along to get along’ with an idea that they may be repulsed by. Cowards and thugs – not a pretty picture of society, but one paid political realists should acknowledge more than they actually do.

None of the foregoing analysis is made to justify political violence. When the left equates rioting with political speech, they have it exactly backwards: rioting is the negation of political speech; it is the negation of democracy; it is the negation of a civil society. My purpose in this article is only to point out the frightening fact that political violence does work, and more often than we acknowledge. Which is all the more reason to ruthlessly crush it when it happens.

David Cameron is John Tory

David Cameron started with a 28% lead in the polls 6 months ago and was barely able to eke out a minority government. Why? Because his positioning of the Conservative party was perfectly wrong. In other words, his wounds were self inflicted, just like John Tory’s were in the last Ontario election when everybody was sick of the Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty but Tory managed to make the election a referendum on funding religious schools.

David Cameron’s Big Idea when he took the helm was to make the Conservative Party more ‘warm and fuzzy’ to broaden the Conservative big tent. To further this goal, he embraced environmentalism, calling the Conservatives the real green party. Then the economy crashed and the expense scandal hit. As a result, anti-incumbent fever swept the electorate and the voters’ minds concentrated on the economy. Euroscepticism was popular too. A perfect environment for traditional conservative values: small, modest government, patriotism, anti-EU policies, Margaret Thatcheresque tax cuts and deregulation, and a dismantling of the PC police state that grew by leaps and bounds under Cool Britannia. Cameron hit all of these themes – eventually, but by then his credibility was weak.

The voters wanted a change and Cameron offered them Tweedlededum instead of Tweedlededee. In the middle of a perilous crisis, Britons were given a choice between three establishment candidates offering minor variations on the status quo.

It never ceases to amaze me how Red Tories on both sides of the Atlantic keep insisting that their watered-down brand of conservatism is the ticket to electoral success, even though the voters keep handing their lunch to them. The Red Tory bargain is to trade principle for electoral success. The trouble is, a lot of the time you end up with neither. Red Tories are often a failure, even on their own terms.